A little local and a little national:
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We spend a fair amount of time in board of education meetings, writing about new or renovated buildings, buses and/or calendars.
But the more important aspect of education is what happens daily in classrooms in each school district.
A few items I have come across in the past week:
•A Commerce social studies teacher is planning a trip with students to the 75th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy. It is not something that will occur in the classroom, and it is pretty pricey, but imagine being at that occasion if you’re a teenager, or an old man like me, and contemplating the events of the invasion of Europe. A high school social studies class on U.S. history is necessarily a “survey.” Students get a smattering of information on a very small sample of the country’s history. The D-Day invasion was one of the seminal moments of that history.
•Robotics competitions in all schools – Jefferson, Jackson County, Barrow County – are occurring at a dizzying pace. I have been in a few classes dealing with robotics and watched as elementary kids dealt with subjects with which I have only a passing familiarity – physics, engineering, chemistry, higher levels of math.
•Reading at grade level is one of the mantras in education today. It may be the most important mantra. Something called the Achieve3000 Read to Succeed contest has been a part of Westside Middle School classes in Barrow County recently. It is all about literacy – a subject in which I have a very selfish interest – and one we all should view as critical.
•Spelling bees in Jackson County and Jefferson have been held recently. I remember – always will – a woman reporter telling a copy editor (my wife) in the mid-1980s, “If I knew how to look it up, I’d know how to spell it.” She was being castigated for a poor spelling of a word she had not bothered to check. Checking the spelling of words is infinitely easier and quicker now than it used to be. Spelling, and recognizing the difference in words – say, “their” and “there” – continues to be a foundation of literacy, and writing. That’s just a sampling and examples I find quickly. All of them could be the subject of quality stories about our schools.
They all require time and effort, just as learning requires time and effort.
Education is not a simple process. It is a messy business, as one erudite superintendent is known to say.
On the occasion of a major reform in education, the speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives (a Democrat who worked closely with a Republican governor) was asked if the changes would be good for students. He said, paraphrasing, “I’ll let you know in about 12 years.”
***
I read about a page and a half of the memo written by Republican staff members and released last Friday to illustrate the “corruption” of the FBI in its investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election and the Trump’s campaign connections to Russian officials.
I re-read parts of it because my immediate reaction was the content was argumentative and opinionated, not an outline of information.
I regret not reading all of it now. Maybe I’ll find time to do that this week.
My reaction was very similar to a lot of other reporters’ I heard over the weekend – where is the substance, where are the connected dots to demonstrate problems with the FBI investigation.
I will admit to a certain bias. I heard for most of two weeks that the point was to be as open and forthcoming with information as possible.
But the House Intelligence Committee voted to release its staff-generated memo, but not the Democrats’ staff-generated memo at the same time.
Where is the “open and forthcoming” action?
Another equally informed opinion came from the president, who pronounced the memo to “vindicate” him.
He made that pronouncement, as with so many things, with no evidence that he had read the memo.
Based on an incomplete and hasty examination, the authors of the memo should have read it, or re-read, it before releasing it.
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Ron Bridgeman is a reporter for Mainstreet Newspapers. Send email to him at ron@mainstreetnews.com.

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